1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to video information processing, and more specifically to detecting scene changes of input video information using a video encoder system with multiple processing devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Each video frame is subdivided and encoded at a video block (e.g., macroblock or the like). Each video block is encoded in “intraframe” mode in which a prediction video block is formed based on reconstructed video blocks in the current frame, or “interframe” mode in which a prediction video block is formed during motion estimation based on reference video blocks from one or more reference frames. The intraframe encoding mode applies spatial information within the current frame in which the prediction video block is formed from samples in the current frame that have previously encoded, decoded and reconstructed. The interframe encoding mode utilizes temporal information from previous and/or future reference frames to estimate motion to form the prediction video block. The video information is typically partitioned into frames which are further partitioned into slices, in which each video slice incorporates one or more video blocks. The video information is typically processed and transmitted in slices.
Interframe encoding generally provides superior encoding efficiency and is usually performed first. Motion estimation, however, consumes most of the encoding processing time and thus is significantly more expensive in terms of processing resource consumption and computational complexity. During a scene change, or when there is significant motion in a given scene, the video encoder may be significantly stressed in terms of coding complexity, expressed in millions of cycles per second (MCPS). Also, during scene changes or significant motion the standard deviation of MCPS is increased which can significantly depreciate system performance.